Well, I find it interesting first that this all centers around the issue of homosexuality and we don't bring in any other sin issue into the picture - the ones that are running rampant within our churches largely go unaddressed. Issues of pride and judgment and gossip and slander and other types of sexual immorality, gluttony, you name it.
In order to obtain and hold power a man must love it. Thus the effort to get it is not likely to be coupled with goodness, but with the opposite qualities of pride, craft and cruelty.
Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.
Those who suffer from an exaggerated sense of their own ability and accomplishment are continually subject to frustration, disappointment, and rage when reality intrudes and the world doesn't validate their idealized view of themselves.
The kernel, the soul let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.
One way leads to acquisition, the other leads to nirvana. Realising this a monk should take no pleasure in the respect of others, but should devote himself to solitude.
Pride is handsome, economical; pride eradicates so many vices, letting none subsist but itself, that it seems as if it were a great gain to exchange vanity for pride.
The spirit of God, like the sun, always gives all its light at once. The spirit of man resembles the pale moon, which has its phases, its absences and its returns, its lucidity and its spots, its fullness and its disappearance, which borrows all its light from the rays of the sun, and which still dares to intercept them on occasion.
There's a lot of pride that business owners have. It's actually really critical that pride and ownership extends to everyone in the organization. I think of everyone is in the same boat in driving the company forward.
Pity is the most pleasant feeling in those who have not much pride and have no prospect of great conquests; for them the easy prey - and that is what all who suffer are - is enchanting.
The Land of Israel will be small, but the people of Israel will make it great. Not
in opulence, but in eminence will their destiny be fulfilled, and the elixir of their
pride will be distilled not out of dominion or far-flung borders, but out of the
faithful and skillful building of the good society.
From here, far away, people seem very good, and that is natural, for in going away into the country we are not hiding from people but from our vanity, which in town among people is unjust and active beyond measure.